As computer systems and computer-enabled technologies have rapidly evolved during the past 60 years, storage and management of electronic data have become increasingly important for both individuals and organizations. Ever increasing processor speeds, memory capacities, mass-storage-device capacities, and networking bandwidths have provided an ever expanding platform for increasingly complex computer applications that generate ever increasing amounts of electronic data that need to be reliably stored and managed. Recent legislation specifying that certain types of electronic data, including emails and transactional data, need to be reliably stored by certain types of commercial organizations for specified periods of time may further increase electronic-data storage and management needs and requirements.
Initially, electronic data was stored on magnetic tapes or magnetic disks directly controlled by, and accessible to, individual computers. Reliability in data storage was achieved by storing multiple copies of critical electronic data on multiple tapes and/or multiple disks. Electronic data was transferred between computer systems by manually carrying a magnetic tape or magnetic disk pack from one computer system to another. As the importance of high availability data storage systems was recognized, and as computer networking technologies evolved, sophisticated database management systems and independent, network-accessible, multi-port mass-storage devices were developed to allow distributed, interconnected computer systems to manage and share access to highly available and robustly stored electronic data. The ever-increasing volume of electronic data generated by modern computer systems and applications, and increasing automation of office, manufacturing, research, and home environments continue to spur research directed to development of new, more capable electronic-data-storage and electronic-data-management systems.
Recent research and development efforts have been directed to distributed, differential electronic-data storage systems comprising multiple fault-tolerant, relatively autonomous, but highly coordinated and interconnected data-storage-system components that cooperate to efficiently store and manage large volumes of electronic data on behalf of remote host computer systems. The level of data compression achieved in these systems may depend on how data objects distributed across the multiple component data-storage systems, and the throughput of these systems may depend on how quickly and efficiently data-objects can be directed to the one or more component data-storage systems on which they are stored. Developers, manufacturers, and users of distributed, differential electronic-data-storage systems have all recognized the need for improved methods for directing data objects to component data-storage systems within a distributed, differential electronic-data storage system.